Motorola partners with Winphoria for softswitches

Motorola and Winphoria Networks, a start-up switching vendor, announced a strategic relationship that calls for Motorola to market and distribute Winphoria’s new soft switch to wireless carriers.

The relationship fills a significant gap Motorola has in the switching market. The company had long purchased switches from its own competitors in order to offer wireless operators a complete line of infrastructure elements. Motorola had previously banked on its strategic relationship with Cisco to fill the void, hoping carriers would quickly move to all IP networks. But the process has been slower than anticipated.

“This fills a hole we’ve had in terms of lack of core functionality inside the network,” said Don Willis, vice president and director of strategic business development with Motorola’s Global Solutions Sector. “Softswitches have been developing here for many years, and what the market has been waiting for is reliable products that have a good feature set.”

Motorola said it has been testing Winphoria’s CDMA switch for nearly six months and plans to roll the product out quickly. The companies plan to begin interoperability testing for GSM products this fall.

For more than a year, Winphoria has been demonstrating its full-featured mobile switching center that boasts a fivefold increase in voice capacity, allows carriers to migrate to IP networks and consumes less space and power than traditional mobile switching centers. The beauty of Winphoria’s MSC, said Motorola, is its ability to sit beside existing MSCs to offload voice capacity and allow carries to transition from 2G to 2.5G to 3G technology because it can be configured to accept different transport modes.

“It’s a much better migration tool than moving the whole network from 2G to 3G,” said Willis. “So we see the upgrade market as a niche we are capable of filling now.”

Winphoria was searching for an infrastructure partner who could support sales and distribution for the company.

--Lynnette Luna, Senior Editor